Altonet aids tax compliance

Nov 13, 2012

The Tax Administration Act of 2011 became effective as of 1 October 2012. This Act, in conjunction with a recently published notice in the Government Gazette by the commissioner of the South African Revenue Service (SARS), lays out several requirements for the digital storage of electronic tax records and other tax related documentation, particularly relating to cloud storage.
Altonet, local distributor of Autonomy, an HP company, is taking the headache out of complying with these and other SARS data storage regulations, with Autonomy LiveVault solutions hosted in the secure, compliant and locally based Teraco data centre.
Using Altonet’s service, organisations can take advantage of the benefits of cloud storage, while ensuring that their data meets all regulatory requirements around SARS compliance.
“According to the new Act and the notice published by SARS, primary tax records that are stored and maintained electronically must be kept at a physical location within South Africa.
“If the documents are to be stored outside of South Africa, organisations need to obtain permission from SARS to do this, and meet a host of other criteria, which complicates the process and even makes some public cloud solutions unviable for the purposes of tax document storage,” says Gareth Tudor, CEO of Altonet.
“Our Autonomy LiveVault solution solves all of these challenges. Data is stored in a private cloud in our 100% local, neutral, data centre hosted by Teraco. We offer a fully managed backup and archiving service and network-independent storage with full redundancy and failover, using a world-leading technology.
“This enables users in South Africa to benefit from cloud storage, without the hassles, and ensure that their tax records and other data are compliant with SARS requirements,” he adds.
Altonet’s hosted Autonomy LiveVault delivers a fully managed tape-free backup and recovery solution in the private cloud. Continuous data backups are performed automatically with no manual intervention required.
Rapid recovery is facilitated using Autonomy’s patented DeltaRestore technology and full systems, applications and data can be restored to existing or new hardware for full disaster recovery capability. The solution also provides de-duplicated backup for optimal storage utilisation and built-in support for open file and database backup.
“Given the sensitivities involved with storing data, particularly tax related documentation, outside of South Africa, locally hosted private cloud storage offers the optimal blend of security, compliance and convenience. A private cloud also negates the security concerns associated with public cloud services, and locally hosted solutions reduce the usage of international bandwidth for smoother, faster operations,” says Tudor.
“All SARS regulations as well as security and archiving best practices are adhered to, removing the headache of compliance while delivering best of breed archiving and backup solutions,” he concludes.
Autonomy LiveVault from Altonet is available through several flexible deployment strategies, including on-premise, cloud-based and a hybrid model that combines the best of both deployment strategies.